Flexier Than You

FLEXIER THAN YOU (3 Min Excerpt of a 18 Min Video) from Zhiyi Cao on Vimeo.

Flexier Than You, 2019 - 2021

First Presented at A Weekend Affair
Screened at Singapore Shorts ‘19 (Asian Film Archive programme)
Screened at Painting with Light ‘21 - Festival of International Films on Art, National Art Gallery

Flexier Than You is an exercise in thinking through the labour and anxieties of ‘creatives’ amongst a population that believes being neoliberal is a personality. Taking the rise (and consequent spectacular fall?) of co-working spaces as a point of departure, and through the voices of two thoroughly disenchanted millennial figures, this video essay seeks to complicate the relations between creativity, competition and control. The visual materials alternate between the hyperlocal (Singaporean indie pop songs, government ‘propaganda’ advertisements) and the attempted-technocratic-universal (such as co-working spaces advertisements), satisfying the insatiable contemporary desire for the ‘glocal’.

Flexier Than You also serves as a pre-cursor and research material to a subsequent, more embodied body of work obsessed with the notion of ‘creative labour’ - Live Creatives Show a reality-miniseries following the lives of 3 artist-creatives inhabiting a co-sharing studio space for 17 days.